Country: United States
Genre: Action/ Comedy/ Mainstream
Director: Renny Harlin
Year: 1996
Rating: 
TRASH CINEMA ESSENTIAL MOVIE
I’m not sure why The Long Kiss Goodnight wasn’t a bigger success when it came out. It is certainly entertaining enough. Maybe the leftist politics woven into the plot alienated patrons in the flyover states.
After all, the idea that a US Government agency would be willing to sacrifice American lives for ulterior motives is preposterous, right? Hmmmm. We’re in the middle of a war in Iraq that was predicated on WMDs that the government knew never existed. It’s more obvious than ever that the Iraq war was all about oil. And let’s see — more American lives have been lost in the Iraq war than in 911. Draw your own conclusions.
There I go again, getting off track.
Samantha Caine (Geena Davis) is an all-American housewife in a small town, who rides Santa’s sleigh as Santa’s wife in the Christmas parade every year. But she’s really Charly Baltimore, sexy secret agent, in deep cover thanks to a near death experience that resulted in amnesia. Got that?
She gets pulled back into the old game over the conspiracy that I mentioned earlier. Helping her out is private eye Mitch Henessey (the invaluable Samuel L. Jackson).
Screenwriter Shane Black got paid three million dollars for the spec script for The Long Kiss Goodnight, which pissed off a lot of people, but the producers got their money’s worth. Shane Black is gifted in so many ways. There are no slow spots in his scripts. He finds ways to cut exposition to the bare minimum. Something interesting is always happening; either some inventive piece of action or humorous dialog. The brilliant thing about Black’s writing is that he doesn’t reinvent the wheel. He takes the existing tropes of a genre, in this case the spy genre, and twists them so that they’re new again.
Black has a sympathetic director in Renny Harlin, too. He handles both the patter and the action beautifully.
The cinematography, by Guillermo Navarro, is perfect for a commercial project like this, slick and gorgeous. Alan Silvestri’s score is beautiful, too, accentuating the action without overwhelming it.
Geena Davis is one of the few actresses I know that could be convincing both as a mommy and as a ruthless assassin. Davis nails the emotional notes in the script and she’s convincing as an action hero as well. Samuel Jackson has great fun with the sidekick role, but he invests the character with a lot of soul as well.
When I saw The Long Kiss Goodnight for the first time, I thought the villains, played by Craig Bierko and David Morse, were a little white bread, kind of bland. They still don’t slay me, but I’ve come to appreciate what interesting casting choices those are. The standard casting for these kinds of roles would be to go for someone sensitive looking who turns out to be a weasel. As actor Peter Sarsgaard could tell you, intelligent sensitive men can’t be trusted. Instead, Casting Directors Mary Vernieu and Ronnie Yeskel used all-American types, forthright manly men for their villains. That’s pretty cool.
A number of fine character actors make the best of their onscreen time here, such as Patrick Malahide, Joseph McKenna, Rex Linn, and G.D. Spradlin.
I have one small objection to The Long Kiss Goodnight. There’s a moment in which Charly Baltimore seems to die, but is instead talked back to life by her eight-year-old daughter. I obediently responded in a Pavlovian way by tearing up on command, but my bullshit detector was going off like crazy.
The plot twists in The Long Kiss Goodnight are certainly outrageous, but in a consistently clever way. It’s funny, it’s exciting, and it has fun surprises strewn throughout the movie every minute or so. It’s a classic of its kind and don’t let anyone else tell you otherwise.
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